Wisconsin public Internet fights telecom attempts to kill it off

A proposal coming out of Wisconsin's legislature would throw that state's …

The University of Wisconsin's Internet technology division and a crucial provider of 'Net access for Wisconsin's educational system are under attack from that state's legislature and from a local telecommunications association. At issue is the WiscNet educational cooperative. The non-profit provides affordable network access to the state's schools and libraries, although its useful days may be numbered unless the picture changes soon.

Under a proposed new law, the University of Wisconsin system could be forced to return millions of dollars in federal broadband grants that it has already won, spend far more money on network services, and perhaps even withdraw from the Internet2 project.

Give it back

As we go to press with this story, WiscNet is negotiating with the leadership of Wisconsin's state legislature. Here's how the situation stands now: at the urging of Wisconsin's state telecommunications association, Republican legislators have introduced an omnibus bill that would sever WiscNet from the University of Wisconsin at Madison's Division of Informational Technology, and bar it from taking any money from UW.

The proposed law even goes so far as to prohibit UW from taking National Telecommunications Information Agency (NTIA) broadband stimulus grants, or joining any entity that offers broadband to the general public.

These measures would force UW to return an estimated $39 million in such funds to Washington, DC, warned Tony Evers, the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, last week. And they would force schools to turn to Badgernet, Wisconsin's state wide-area-network, which depends heavily on AT&T as its primary vendor.

"These provisions will have a devastating impact on the University of Wisconsin System campuses and our schools and public libraries," Evers told the state legislature following the bill's passage from a Joint Finance Committee on Friday June 3. "You cannot have a renowned research institution, like the UW-Madison, without having access to such networks."

We spoke with David Lois, Executive Director of WiscNet, on Saturday; he's busy working with legislators to avert disaster. "We're looking for opportunities to move forward and we're working on some sort of compromise, but it's difficult when we're beginning at this point," he told Ars.

University of Wisconsin economic development professor Andy Lewis is also involved in the negotiations. "I think this has always been about the telcos getting us to return those stimulus grants," he explained. "I think that this has been about what it has been all about from the beginning."

This is a development of huge significance; the University of Wisconsin helped invent the 'Net as we know it.

Wisconsin's idea

Were it not for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Internet might look very different. Three decades ago, Wisconsin engineers and scientists pioneered the Computer Science Research Network (CSNET)—an affordable Internet Protocol based infrastructure that would link computer science departments across the country. CSNET addressed a crucial problem. Many CS departments could not or were not qualified to hook up to the ARPANET, the original IP network. Either they either did not engage in defense research or they lacked the high price tag for admission.

As a consequence, research institutions that had no ARPANET access faced extinction, as faculty and graduate students migrated elsewhere, in many instances to well funded private sector facilities with ARPANET membership.

"An exodus of computing talent from academia to industry had caused a nationwide fear that the United States would not be able to train its next generation of computer scientists," write Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon in their history of the 'Net, When Wizards Stay Up Late.

So Madison invited six other universities to a meeting, then lobbed a series of proposals over to the National Science Foundation for funding. Under the final NSF plan, colleges would get affordable access to Telnet and several other early network protocols. CSNET was a huge success. Within five years, practically every computer science department in the United States had Internet access, thanks to the experiment.

But Madison's brainchild also inspired the NSF to create NSFNet—a series of regional CSNET-like projects that followed the affordable Madison educational model. "By the end of 1989, the ARPANET was gone," Hafter and Lyon write. "The NSFNET and the regional networks it had spawned became the principal backbone."

WiscNet is a state level spinoff from the CSNET idea. From 1990 through 1995, the non-profit won NSF grants to extend Internet access to all the states' colleges and universities. Then the project wired up the majority of school districts. Next came libraries and local governments. None of this could have happened without the constant assistance of the IT staff at UWMadison, which WiscNet hired to manage and run the system.

75 percent of Wisconsin's schools and 95 percent of its public libraries now get Internet access from WiscNet. Like CSNET, WiscNet became a model for educational systems across the country. It also became a target for the Wisconsin State Telecommunications Association.

Duplicate network?

In October of 2010, the WSTA launched a campaign denouncing a UW plan to use federal stimulus money to expand WiscNet's presence in four Wisconsin communities.

"A duplicate network will increase costs for everyone and impact the ability of local telecommunications providers to invest in their communities," declared WSTA's Executive Director William Esbeck. "With scare state resources, do we really need the UW using government money to stifle private sector investment and threaten local jobs and businesses?"

The trade association went so far as to suggest that UW/WiscNet's activities were unlawful. "The legal issues are being researched and lawsuits are a possibility," Esbeck insisted. "The UW does not belong in the telecommunications business . . . the current statutes are very clear on that point."

Actually, the Wisconsin statutes that Esbeck cited are anything but clear. Sure, section 16.972(2)(a) says that no Wisconsin state agency:

may offer, resell, or provide telecommunications services, including data and voice over Internet services, that are available from a private telecommunications carrier to the general public or to any other public or private entity.

provide such computer services and telecommunications services to local governmental units and the broadcasting corporation and provide such telecommunications services to qualified private schools, tribal schools, postsecondary institutions, museums, and zoos, as the department considers to be appropriate and as the department can efficiently and economically provide.

Undaunted by these inconvenient technicalities, the group asked for "more legislative review of UW's broadband plans." Eventually, that review arrived in the form of the already mentioned omnibus legislation. Section 23 of the new proposal would prohibit the UW system from receiving or dispersing any funds from the NTIA's broadband stimulus program. Section 24 would amend current law to prevent the state's Board of Regents or UW System from providing telecommunications services "that are available from a private telecommunications carrier to the general public or to any other private entity" to anyone except the UW system itself.

Section 25 would prohibit the UW System from "becoming or remaining a member, shareholder, or partner" with any entity that "offers, resells, or provides telecommunications services to members of the general public." And finally, provision 26 specifies that WiscNet must separate itself from the UW-Madison Division of Information Technology as of July 1, 2012, and forgo the $1.4 million from the UW system intended for WiscNet in 2012-13.

Making it impossible

There are a variety of problems with this proposal from the perspective of WiscNet and Wisconsin's public colleges and schools. First, there's the spectacle of UW giving back millions of federal dollars earmarked for educational broadband upgrades. "We're trying to save the public money," Lois pleaded in his conversation with us. "We're talking about millions more to do broadband in the state."

Then, as Superintendent Evers pointed out in his letter, financially and operationally cutting WiscNet off from Wisconsin institutions will cripple its efforts.

"The provision in this legislation will very likely make it impossible for WiscNet to continue offering Internet access," he noted. "If our schools and libraries must use other Internet providers, most will pay at least 2-3 times more than what WiscNet now charges."

A UW response to the "duplication-of-services" charge contends that 100Mbps BadgerNet service currently runs $6,000 a month; 1,000Mbps goes for $49,500 a month. "These costs will likely drop with renewal of the BadgerNet contract but this has not happened yet," the statement notes. "And even when it does, the costs will likely still be too high."

And unlike WiscNet, schools will then be charged by bandwidth use. At present, "as schools and libraries continue to increase their bandwidth, their WiscNet costs remain the same," Evers writes. "With our schools and libraries facing substantial budget reductions, how can anyone justify making them pay more for less service?"

To put it in comparative terms, UW Chief Information Officer Ed Meachen told WTN News that because of the different bandwidth pricing approaches, WiscNet costs the UW system $2 million a year. BadgerNet would cost $8 million.

Height of irony

The legislature has received hundreds of letters protesting these proposals. One of the most notable comes from H. David Lambert, CEO of Internet2, the non-profit ramping up to provide 8.8 terabits per second of bandwidth to the US Unified Community Anchor Network (US UCAN). The network amounts to around 200,000 community "anchor institutions"—K-12 schools, libraries, clinics, hospitals, and community colleges. In the winter of 2010, the project received a $62 million broadband stimulus grant from the government to get this project underway.

"It would be the height of irony if sections 23-26 of the University Omnibus legislation were passed, as those provisions would prohibit the University from being directly involved in proving out further developments of innovations in the Internet that it helped create," he wrote. "This would deny the University the ability to participate in the innovation cycle that created the market for commercial providers (including those who support the 11th hour insertion of sections 23-26) to provide their services in the first place."

As for WiscNet's Lois, he seemed cautiously optimistic, at least on Saturday. "The legislators have heard the WiscNet community. They've said 'you can't do this to us'," he explained. "We're trying to come up with a reasonable compromise."

UW's Lewis thinks that most of those section paragraphs could disappear, save language forcing a return of the grants. This would force the layoff of personnel already involved in rolling out broadband to those four areas.

"This thing is entirely inappropriate," Lewis declared. "If our slogan is 'Wisconsin is open for business,' we're going in the wrong direction."

When might a new proposal emerge? "Monday at noon at the earliest. Tuesday at the latest," Lois predicts.

Matthew Lasar / Matt writes for Ars Technica about media/technology history, intellectual property, the FCC, or the Internet in general. He teaches United States history and politics at the University of California at Santa Cruz.